Personally, I can't help but note that, some time over the past year, I stopped automatically writing "we" as a synonym for "Americans" in my email, and started adding qualifiers with the appenda "US"-this or "American"-that. A totally unconscious shift, it's like the fingers are smarter than the brain.
-- Dennis ----------
This is a pretty complicated issue that could be opened out like an onion, peeling back layer after layer of social and cultural woundings, differances, alienations, isolations, disenfranchisements, dismemberments, and deaths---all in the interstitial spaces between we and them.
It is actually beyond political in the sense that a civil war is not primarily political, but rather the disappearance of the political realm. I think this is why civil wars make no sense to outsiders. That is, because there is no rational construct that can account for it; only a kind of wounding of the social psyche seems worthy of the fall into bestiality.
Chuck Grimes